David Lindsey - The Rules of Silence

“These are your people? ”Titus asked.

“I've worked with them before, ”he said. He was standing with his fist on his hip, his jacket pushed back a little. Titus saw Rita glance at the gun at his waist.

“And you've worked with Garcia Burden before, too?” Rita asked. “Is that right?”

“Yeah. A few years back.”

She looked at him. “Why don't you just give me some idea of what this man's like?”

Norlin flicked an uneasy glance at Titus and then looked down, collecting his thoughts.

“That's kind of touchy, ”he said.

“What do you mean? ”she asked. Her voice had a barb to it, as if his reluctance were somehow unworthy.

“Well, you're working with him-”

“Look, ”she interrupted, and then she hesitated nervously-or was it angrily? “People are dying here, ”she said, “and any scruples you might feel of a professional nature just don't seem significant to me right now.”

Norlin was looking at her. He didn't seem particularly taken aback, nor was he intimidated, but Rita had definitely cut through a lot of crap that he was used to falling back on when he was put on the spot.

“Well, he's had a full life, ”Norlin said with intended irony. “What did you have in mind?”

“Just give me some sense of what he's like, ”she said. “Something that… orients him in my head, gives me some perspective. Look, we're working with this man because you recommended him. Now you think about it: We don't really know you, either. You think it's just… the way it ought to be that just because we're scared to death here, we should start trusting people who-let's face it-are leading pretty damn murky lives? I don't know what you do. Titus has told me how he first met you, but then… what's that? You seem to be who you say you are, but then, how the hell are we to know, really? We haven't seen any credentials. Right? No one that we know we can trust has called us and vouched for you, have they? You know, Mr. Norlin”-she put a little extra on the “Mr. Norlin”-“we don't just intuit your integrity, or your legitimacy, for that matter. The fact that we're even working with him, Burden, or you… or any of these other people”-she gestured broadly toward the bodyguards, toward Herrin in the guest house-“strikes me as… just… insane when I think about it.”

By the time she had stopped, her voice was quavering with a complex brew of emotions. But the torrent of words had had its effect on Norlin. He seemed to soften a little as he looked at her.

“You have a good point, Mrs. Cain, ”he said carefully. “But let me say, it's only insane if you think of it from the point of view of your life before Cayetano Luquin. After Luquin, insane takes on another meaning altogether. But, ”he added quickly, “you're right. You've been asked to take a lot on faith. Those of us in this line of work, we don't appreciate that enough.”

He gave some thought to what he was about to say.

He leaned against the kitchen counter and folded his arms across his chest. His old suit, already sagging at all of its stress points, bunched up across his shoulders as if it had done this a thousand times before and knew the routine.

“On a personal level, ”he said, looking at Rita, “and I've told Titus this, I trust this man implicitly. But the thing is, the thing that would be hard for you to sort of get a grip on, is that my trust lies within a context of extremes. The things I trust him to do, for instance, are things that would probably shock you.”

Another pause. “I could talk about him for days. Don't waste your time trying to figure him out. The only person I know who comes even close to having done that is the woman he lives with. Her name's Lucia. I don't know how many years he's been with her. She's a Roma, a Gypsy from Sicily. Photographer. ”He looked at Titus. “Took all-or most-of those pictures you saw in his place. She's as inexplicable as he is, and they're devoted to each other… way past anything I've ever seen between two people. But that's personal stuff, not exactly where we want to go.

“Look, ”he said, “I'll tell you what. I don't really know how to do this, so I'll just tell you a story. I could tell you scores of them, but I think this one will do for right now. I'll make it short, but I think it'll give you some idea what Garcia Burden's life is like.”

“Several years ago, ”Norlin began, “an Algerian Islamic extremist, guy named Mourad Berkat, showed up in surveillance photos in Mexico City. He was in the company of members of a drug-trafficking cartel that had established Middle Eastern connections.

“Berkat had been a GIA terrorist in Algiers during the eighties and early nineties, but he had ambitions and had become a freelance assassin working mostly for the capos in the drug underworld in Spain, Sicily, and France. He liked poisons and chemicals, unusual for a hit man. His appearance in Mexico set off alarms.

“Garcia was called in… for various special reasons. Turned out that Berkat was trying to obtain the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Uh, it's an organism that produces an exotoxin, a damned lethal exotoxin, one hundred thousand times more powerful than the sarin nerve agent. But this stuff also has medical uses, as a therapeutic agent in the treatment of certain neurological disorders, for example. So it was a dual-use substance that could legitimately be found in some pharmaceutical and medical environments.

“Garcia sent out a string of alerts to his foreign assets, but a month went by before one of them called him about a woman doctor in Paris who turned up dead in her apartment. She worked for a research clinic that specialized in neurological diseases. Berkat's photo was found in her possessions. A torn-up metro ticket led them to an apartment near Charles de Gaulle Airport, where surveillance photographs picked up a Hamas agent leaving the apartment.

“Berkat wasn't really on the Mossad's radar screen, but they sure as hell knew the Hamas guy. They quickly located Berkat in Gaza City, and then grabbed photographs of him at a cafe talking to Hassan al-Abed. Al-Abed had a doctorate in biological sciences from Cairo University. Back in Paris, the French DST confirmed the missing Clostridium botulinum from the research clinic. Now Garcia was sure that Hamas/Berkat were working on a dispersal method for the exotoxin.”

Norlin shifted on his feet. Gave it some more thought before he went on.

“Berkat disappeared from Gaza, and his trail went cold. Then three months later one of Garcia's agents picked it up again in Strasbourg. Berkat had spent the night with a woman there who said that he'd used her computer nonstop for a whole day before moving on. Garcia's people sucked the marrow out of the hard drive and found that he'd booked a twoweek vacation cruise from Brest to St. Kitts under a French name, traveling with his wife and two kids. That was Berkat's shtick, using the family man thing as a cover. He seemed to find no end of gullible women to help him without realizing what they were doing.

“They tracked him to Belize, where he abandoned his ‘family.’Now, under a different French name, he caught a flight to Tampico, where he rented an SUV under the name of a Mexican national and headed north.

“By now everyone had to assume that his target was somewhere in the States. Even beyond the issue of national security, the people who hired Garcia didn't want it known that a terrorist with a biological weapon had made it within even a hundred miles of our borders. At that time, we were still whistling through the graveyard and hoping the public didn't notice just how damned vulnerable we really were.

“God knows what kind of political repercussions there might be if people ever rolled their asses off their sofas and woke up to what was really going on. And the politicians didn't want the public to get the idea that Mexico was swarming with terrorists-bad for NAFTA-even though it was, and still is, a very real issue of concern. Another one of those things they hope the public doesn't wake up to.